On St. Patrick’s Day in 2008, Chris Downey, an architect, planner and consultant who lives in Piedmont, California, some 10 miles east of San Francisco, reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor. The procedure was a success. But two days later, his sight started to fail. On the third day, it was gone.

Remarkably, Downey managed to get back to work within months — and, he says, he never once thought of giving up his work in architecture. In his current role, as a consultant to architectural practices in San Francisco and beyond, he commutes to the city via public transportation four days a week. On the fifth day, he heads to UC Berkeley, where he teaches accessibility and universal design.

It’s a remarkable story, but Downey, who talked about the challenges of navigating through cities in his inspiring and funny TED Talk (the guy’s got a great sense of humor), admits that it wasn’t easy. After 46 years of living with sight, waking up one day blind — and with no sense of smell, which he also lost in the surgery — was “quite frankly, really terrifying.”

“You don’t just show up knowing how to do it,” he says. “There’s a lot of intense training that goes along with it. Mentally, it’s hard work. You’re having to think through things in a different way. The first time at a major intersection where I stepped off into the street to cross on my own, it was like, ‘Oh my god.'”

Downey begins each day with a 5:05 a.m. pickup for crew practice (he rows with the East Bay Rowing Club on the Oakland Estuary). He rows, he says, for exercise and competition — and because it’s the ideal sport for his situation. “It’s a great way to start the day. It’s amazing and cool being in these tiny boats with the water right there at your fingertips. Once you’re in the boat, you’re facing away from the direction you travel, so you’re just another one of the guys. Everyone’s relying on the feel of the boat and sound of the oars hitting the water.”

As far as navigation for the blind, Downey says San Francisco and Piedmont are actually pretty good. Both places are walkable, and there’s accessible public transit, including streetcars, buses, cable cars and the BART subway system.

“In the core of San Francisco, there are no big streets, so it’s not like you have to cross anything that feels like a freeway,” he says. “Having the grid of the city helps a lot. The only place it really falls apart is along the south side of Market Street, because the grid rotates into all these weird sections.”

One unexpected thing Downey, who is six-foot-four, has to worry about while walking around? Tree branches.

“I’m tall, so that puts me in good range of a lot of branches,” he says with another laugh. “Walking around Piedmont is a real challenge sometimes because there are lots of low-lying limbs.” Still, being friends with the town’s director of public works (their kids have gone to school together since kindergarten) has its advantages: The street crews, aware of Downey’s blindness, trim the branches near and around his house. “You gotta know the right people,” he jokes. “A little branch hanging out? No big deal. But big, honking, solid branches at forehead level? I’ve found a few of those. And they can be painful.”

Downey became intrigued with architecture when he was 6 years old, when his parents worked with an architect to design a brand-new house in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. He realized that buildings and structures could be creative and fun. “I got to explore the house being constructed, which was great. It was like a playground — you could walk onto the roof from the tall side of the house, and it was built around big trees, creating a courtyard. It was a modern space that tied into the landscape.”

Now, as one of the few blind architects in the world, Downey has taken a keen interest in multisensory design, which is important for visually impaired people who rely on touch, sound or smell to navigate. “Think about architectural environments that are [visually] monotonous, like hospitals or big convention centers,” he says. “Try that blind, when it all feels the same and sounds the same.”

When he first returned to work in Oakland, for example, he found that he couldn’t get to the bathroom on his own. “I returned to the office before I started orientation and mobility training,” he recalls. “The bathrooms were out of the office and down a few hallways. I typically had the office manager guide me there.”

These days, he says, he designs with a tactile palette, not just a color palette, in mind. “Blind people rely on acoustics to get around. I test materials with my cane to see how they feel. Instead of doing a ‘walk-through,’ we create a ‘tap-through,’ so you hear what it’s like when you tap your cane throughout the building.” He uses an embossing printer to print out drawings of the spaces he works on. (Recent projects include eye centers in California and at Duke University, and innovative transportation hubs in the Bay Area.)

“The San Francisco Bay Area really does have a vibrant and empowering blind community,” he says. “I’ve always been quite intentional about networking. I wanted to meet the most effective, aggressive and accomplished blind people that I could. It seemed important to have great mentors while also keeping the bar high relative to expectations and goals. The blind crowd had it down, with all sorts of pragmatic and philosophical advice. Besides, it seemed like I kept meeting all sorts of really cool and interesting people — I was miffed that I had to lose my sight to meet them!” Today, Downey is himself a key member of the city’s blind network, and also serves on the board of directors for LightHouse, an organization promoting independence and self-reliance for those who are blind or visually impaired.

“The blind crowd tends to be pretty resilient and great problem-solvers,” he continues. For Downey, that resilience includes a newfound appreciation for life’s everyday sounds.

“I love sitting on our front porch,” he muses. “It’s something I didn’t think that much of before I lost my sight. I’ll be sitting there, early in the morning, just listening to the birds coming out and the breezes blowing through. It’s an incredible sensory experience. I’m hearing leaves falling off the branches and bouncing off other branches and hitting the sidewalk. It’s not that I hear any better, it’s just that I never would have noticed that before. It’s incredibly beautiful to think about.”

And, check out some of his favorite places in San Francisco on this annotated map. (Click the pins for more details):

This profile is part of a series of TED articles about interesting people and their life and work in a particular city. See also interviews with Nurur Rahman Khan, an architect in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Danny Squires, an urban designer in earthquake-devastated Christchurch, New Zealand. For other city-related content, go to TED’s Cities topic page »

We all know the five senses by heart and yet, points out designer Jinsop Lee in today’s talk, few products and experiences tick all five. And thus he created “5 senses graphs” to grade objects on how well they play to each of our assorted senses on a scale of 1 to 10. Riding a motorcycle = good on all but smell and taste. Instant noodles = good on all but sight and sound.

Watch this whimsical talk, which will have you grading almost everything as you go about your day. (Reading email = low on sound, taste and smell. Walking down the street = low on touch.) And below, we asked Lee to use his scale to compare some great experiences to explain why some are just a little more compelling.

In 2007, I visited a friend’s house for a chat and he showed me the Nintendo Wii. We didn’t end up chatting at all. Within a week I had my own Nintendo Wii — my first video game console in 15 years. The 5 senses theory helps to explain why I jumped to make this purchase.

The book versus movie debate is one we can all relate to. I’m not one of those snobs that always proclaims the book is better. Often, the movie version is far more enjoyable and allows me to pretend that I’ve read the book. Except for one of my favorite stories, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What the 5 senses graph cannot show is this; when I was reading the book, I was Willy Wonka. Obviously, the movie destroyed that daydream.

I chose this last comparison because they are two of the highest rated experiences from my 5 senses diary. And both involve falling. Not only do these graphs look similar, but many other action-packed activities also rank low for smell and taste. Great sex is almost the perfect 5 senses experience because it is one of the very, very few activities that also includes these two senses to a high degree. Also, great sex does not require a highly-trained pilot.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/the-5-senses-showdown-how-to-grade-your-experiences/feed/15Jinsop-Lee-featurekatetedJinsop-Lee-and-toothbrushFive-senses-Video-gamesFive-senses-CharlieI chose this last comparison because they are two of the highest rated experiences from my 5 senses diary. And both involve falling. Not only do these graphs look similar, but many other action-packed activities also rank low for smell and taste. Great sex is almost the perfect 5 senses experience because it is one of the very, very few activities that also includes these two senses to a high degree. Also, great sex does not require a highly-trained pilot.Why is sex so damn good? Jinsop Lee at TED2013http://blog.ted.com/why-is-sex-so-damn-good-jinsop-lee-at-ted2013/
http://blog.ted.com/why-is-sex-so-damn-good-jinsop-lee-at-ted2013/#commentsWed, 27 Feb 2013 21:05:09 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=70287[…]]]>

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Jinsop Lee is here at TED to ask a very important question: Why is sex so damn good? The audience laughs, but the playful designer is making a serious point. Great sex, and great design, is about the five senses and how and when we use them.

Lee tells us the story of a university challenge to create a clock. Lee’s design involved a sunflower that turned toward the sun; his friend Chris Hosmer‘s comprised five magnifying glasses with a shot glass of scented oil under each one. During the course of the day, five different scents would disperse to let people know the time of day just by smell. “I thought my idea was pretty good; his idea is genius,” says Lee.

Years later, a friend of Lee’s suggested to him that maybe sex is so damn good because of the five senses. Hm! he thought. He decided to start documenting the impact of various experiences on the five senses. He took a motorcycle ride around Seoul, video of which he plays to us now, and charted the quality of sights (5), sounds (5), smells (3) and tastes (0). Later, he extended this still-unscientific experiment to gather data from his friends and students, charting the impact of activities such as eating instant noodles (note the sound of slurping) or clubbing (and the unexpected pleasures of kissing).

The only perfect experience? Great sex.

As he was doing the research, Lee thought back to his friend’s clock, which integrates the sense of smell into telling the time. And it showed him what is missing from so much contemporary product design. “Designers only use design to make things look very pretty; sometimes they use touch,” he says. “We’ve ignored the other three senses. What if we started using five senses in our designs?” He shows three of his ideas: An iron that adds scented spray to make clothes smell fresh and to improve the drudgery of ironing. A toothbrush tastes like candy; when it doesn’t, it means it’s time to buy a new brush. Or, his final concept: “I don’t play the flute or the clarinet but I love the feel of pressing the keys. I decided to combine these keys with an instrument I do play, the television remote control,” he says.

The five senses aren’t everything, Lee acknowledges. There are also emotions and the all-elusive X-factor. But it’s a useful framework for designers to consider when trying to create products and experiences that can endure. Could the TED audience use a bit more taste and smell? Lee wonders. With that, bends down and grabs a bucket — and throws handfuls of candy into the audience before scampering offstage.